ralistic focus of traditional science but its social dynamics. I have called this
dynamic rapid-discovery science (Chapter 10). By linking intellectual networks
to genealogies of research equipment, a stream of new phenomena is produced
on which theoretical interpretations may be constructed. Innovation and hence
intellectual reputations no longer depend on moves in the abstraction-reflexiv-
ity sequence, as in philosophy, but on manipulating the forefront of research
technology, the offspring of Galileo’s telescope and Boyle’s air pump.^7
The question of occult influence in the scientific revolution arises because
the takeoff of rapid-discovery science took place in the same networks which
included an upsurge of interest in occultism: Paracelsus, Bruno, Kepler, and
Newton are famous examples of the overlap. Occultism did not cause rapid-
discovery science; the one is a mode of thought (and a long-standing traditional
one at that), the other a reorganization in social practice and material posses-
sions. In mathematics, where the rapid-discovery mode took off a generation
or so before it did in physical science, the new “machinery” for setting up and
manipulating equations was quite distinct from the methods of occultist nu-
merology, which underwent no revolution.^8
There is, however, a similarity in the social milieux which constituted both
occultism and rapid-discovery science. Both brought together lay interests with
the higher abstractions of the inwardly oriented arguments of the intellectual
network. Rapid-discovery science emerged when a branch of the philosophical
network fused with commercial and other practitioners who had been devel-
oping the genealogies of physical equipment such as lenses and pumps. Oc-
cultism is the use of higher abstraction schemes from the intellectual world as
an invisible world of correspondences, by which practitioners appeal to lay
interests in magical manipulation and prognostication. The late Renaissance–
post-Reformation period, with its upheaval in the material bases of intellectual
production and its cracking of religious-political legitimation schemes, pro-
moted the reshuffling of networks in both these respects. Occultism did not
cause the rapid-discovery scientific revolution, but there is an underlying re-
semblance in the causes of both.
The Epistemology-Metaphysics Sequence
We enter now the second of the major pathways of rising abstraction and
reflexivity.
assertive, descriptive, and critical epistemologies
The world ingredient cosmologies, especially in their early periods, are as-
serted, not argued for. They are left to carry the day by their impressiveness
as striking imagery, and later by the comprehensiveness and coherence of the
Sequence and Branch in the Social Production of Ideas^ •^807